Tag Archive for nyc

For some reason unknown to me — as the reasons for most things are — yesterday morning’s walk to the basketball gym was rife with discarded items that practically wrote their own captions. Here are mine; you’re welcome to send yours.

Honey… About the dog…

Whee! First-class flatbed from now on!

It should’ve set off warning bells when he insisted on hanging that stupid self-portrait in the living room.

It’s not uncommon here to see plastic bottles and aluminum cans left beside trash containers, for street people to collect and redeem for the nickel or dime. People often place them carefully so they won’t blow away. This, however, was new to me: a pile, worth a couple of bucks, with its own handy carrying bag. I love New York.

…of two or three thousands miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else: but above all he must and will feel a fool.”

— Peter Fleming

She will, too. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you’ll recognize the quote. I use it whenever I take a big trip because it’s always accurate. I’m leaving in half an hour for the airport to go to Budapest and points east, circling back around to end in Prague. The cat, plants, and apartment have a great sitter; all my work is done; even the weather’s beautiful. And what a fool I feel!

But I’m going to the land of my people — not quite, we’re from Ukraine, but on this trip I’ll spend a lot of time walking the streets walked for centuries, until WWII, by Ashkenazi Jews, who are my extended people — and I’m going with some of my favorite traveling buddies, the gang I’ve been to western China and to Mongolia with. I expect once I really get there the whole fool/jitters/travel anxiety thing will melt away, and the trip will be great. Right now, I just want to stay home in my comfort zone, but that’s why you travel, isn’t it? When the comfort zone gets to comfortable, then you gotta go.

Try to stay out of trouble while I’m gone. Or, if you insist on getting into trouble, try to enjoy it.

I leave you, and NYC, with a river photo. The next river I sit beside, if all goes well, will be the Danube.

Haven’t done one of these in awhile, but NYC, my home place, just keeps coming. A few recent wonderfulnesses:

In Queens, right outside the gates to a large cemetery, stand two commercial enterprises. One, unsurprisingly, sells gravestones. The other sells construction supplies: hard hats, safety cones, warning flags. This strikes me as an excellent choice of location on the part of the construction business. The subliminal message is so clear as to hardly be subliminal: If you don’t buy OUR products, you might have to buy THEIR products.

Also in Queens, a psychic has a storefront office next to the We Buy Gold store. This is for your convenience, in case the psychic gives you bad news?

And, finally: the guy in the shoe repair/keymaking shop on 44th St. has a plastic jug into which runs a flexible piece of hose containing the overflow from his air conditioning unit. I’m thinking, how courteous, to keep people’s shoes dry, preventing what would otherwise be a small but steady stream on the sidewalk. That may have been the original impulse; but I was there when he opened the shop yesterday morning. He took the hose out of the jug, crossed the sidewalk, and carefully watered the street tree in front of his shop.

Meanwhile, with all the appallingness going on in the world, New York continues to come through. On the serious side, there’s now free college tuition throughout the state for kids of middle-class families, and a serious look being taken in Albany at single-payer health care. And on the who’d-a-thunk-it side, there’s this. It’s the NYPD Out and Proud Mobile, parked across the street from the Stonewall Inn, where what was then called the Gay Liberation movement really took off in 1969 in response to a, yes, NYPD raid. What you can hardly see unless you look closely is that the lights in the light bar on top are rainbow-colored. What you don’t see is that I had to wait to shoot this photo until a car pulled away — it was driven by a black-dressed Hasidic Jew who stopped beside the cops, gave them a thumbs-up, and said in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You guys are beautiful!”

Pouring in NYC this afternoon, so I ducked into one of those specialty coffee places. I waited behind two other wet people ordering from a barista so sprightly I could only assume he’d been hitting the product. When it was my turn I asked for a cup of tea. He pirouetted, grabbed a teabag, pulled the hot water, and said, “I can tell you how tea started. I mean, if you have time.”

“It’s raining, go ahead.”

“Well, a couple of thousand years ago the emperor of China used to drink hot water three times a day and then one day he was sitting in the garden and a leaf fell into his water and when his servants tried to take it away and give him another he said no because it was fate so he’d drink it and see what happened so they all watched and they were scared but afterwards he felt so great he wanted more of those leaves in his water the next day. And that’s how tea started.”

He grinned, gave me my tea, looked past me at the wet young man behind me and said, “What can I get you?”

Went out twice today, to keep appointments. After the first time, came home and wrote; after the second, toddled back to take a nap. But the sun’s out for the first time since Sunday and I feel better, though my cough sounds worse. Skipping basketball tonight but tomorrow I think I’ll launch myself back into action. Writing in the morning, a light gym workout (and some time in the steam room, for therapeutic purposes, of course), then a class I’m teaching, then one I’m taking.

Meanwhile, finished my taxes! Wrote, read, sorted through books to keep or gently move on, and as I started this post I realized this may be the first time since I began blogging that I’ve done four posts in four days. Will try to keep the surprising lessons of this staycation in mind, because think how even much more satisfying it will be if I can do it feeling well!

Since you were all so generous on the subject of my photos (thank you!) I’m going to close today with one of my personal favorites, of the west wall of the NYPL, Bryant Park, reflecting a September sunset.

Windy, heavy snow and sleet when I was out this morning, but blizzard? Nah. Still, almost no one down by the river but me. One other photographer, two joggers, and one dogwalker: the big tattooed guy with the four little dachsunds. This is their foot/paw prints in the snow.

And this is the dogwalker with the dogs and the jogger. These are all 8:00 a.m. photos, by the way.